South Austin Popular Culture Center -AUSTIN REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE, PSYCH & COUNTRY

THE PROJECT
The “Live Music Capital of the World” celebrates ephemeral performance, but it also leaves an indelible record in vinyl. Vinyl’s resurgence owes much to acoustic fidelity, surely, but there is also something to be said for its tactile nature in a digital world. We enjoy the act of putting needle to groove. We relish the attention records ask of us for the span of a song or an album, as opposed to musical algorithms that stream as background noise. And records tell stories about those who have made them, about those who have loved them, and about the scenes through which they grew.

Austin Revolutions per Minute is a project dedicated to these stories, and we invite Austinites and Fusebox fans to gather together to explore music’s sense of time—the length of a 45, the span of a generation, the history of a community—and space—the acoustics of a room, the legendary aura of a club, and the rapidly shifting geography of a city.

Authors, musicians, music professionals, and students of the Austin past from such groups as the Center for Texas Music History, the Reverberation Appreciation Society, the Austin Latino Music Association, Austin Tejano Music Coalition, and Crossroads Events will set up shop with record players in sites related to the city’s rich musical history. From venues of performance such as East Austin’s Victory Grill to spaces dedicated to cultural memory like the South Austin Popular Culture Center, each space will be themed around genre—country and Tejano, blues and jazz, psychedelic and punk. This will not be a performance or a formal talk that happens at an appointed hour for a specific duration. At the heart of this project, rather, is a person, sitting in a room, with a turntable and a box of records that help tell the story of this city. To be complete, those stories need you, the listener and participant, and we invite festival-goers to drop by to talk about records and music and the history of the place we call home. We at Austin Revolutions per Minute will tell some stories that we know, and learn from you stories we haven’t heard before.